A Zimbabwean peacekeeper who recently completed her assignment with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), will receive the 2021 United Nations Military Gender Advocate of the Year Award.
A Zimbabwean peacekeeper who recently completed her assignment with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), will receive the 2021 United Nations Military Gender Advocate of the Year Award.
For the first time on record, the number of forcibly displaced people around the world had topped 100 million, propelled by the war in Ukraine and other conflicts, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports.
Jayathma Wickramanayake, the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth, and The Body Shop, launched a campaign today that seeks to get young voices into the halls of power. The campaign, “Be Seen, Be Heard”, seeks to create long-term structural changes that will make decision-making more inclusive of young people and ensure their participation in political life.
Senegal’s armed forces were approved today to receive funding from the Elsie Initiative Fund to assess barriers to the participation of women in United Nations peace operations. Senegal is the sixteenth largest troop-contributing country and has 987 personnel deployed as of February 2022, of whom 38, or 3.8 per cent, are women.
Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Gender Caucus high-level event “In pursuit of gender equality for strong land stewardship”, in Abidjan today:
With conflicts proliferating and the world’s social fabric increasingly under strain, the use of sexual violence as a tool of power and dominance is also on the rise, experts warned the Security Council today, as delegates from around the world considered the current status of “war’s oldest, most silenced and least-condemned crime”.
The United Nations team in Myanmar remains alarmed by deteriorating humanitarian conditions amid continued fighting, particularly in the country’s south-east and north-west. Across Myanmar, more than 900,000 people are displaced, including more than 560,000 people who remain uprooted since the military takeover in February 2021.
Increasing reports of sexual violence and human trafficking in Ukraine — allegedly committed against women and children in the context of massive displacement and ongoing fighting — are raising “all the red flags” about a potential protection crisis, the Executive Director of the United Nations gender agency warned the Security Council today.
Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message on the launch of the Zambia Chapter of the African Women Leaders Network, in Lusaka, Zambia, today:
The Commission on the Status of Women approved the first‑ever set of agreed conclusions focused on empowering women and girls in the context of climate action, as it concluded its sixty-sixth session late tonight.
A crisis, whether it is the COVID-19 pandemic or the devastating effects of climate change, can be an opportunity to empower women and advance gender equality by putting women in the centre of the recovery process, speakers told the Commission on the Status of Women during a panel discussion today.
The following statement by UN Secretary-General António Guterres was issued today:
On the heels of International Water Day, which was yesterday, humanitarian staff in the Horn of Africa say millions of people face severe water shortages and are going hungry due to the devastating drought in that region, which risks becoming one of the Horn’s worst climate-induced emergencies in the last 40 years.
Despite progress in bringing women to the table when shaping climate change responses, more must be done to ensure equality in local to global decision-making roles, delegates and civil society representatives said today, as the Commission on the Status of Women concluded the general discussion segment of its sixty-sixth session.
Following is the text of UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ video message to the Group of Friends Commission on the Status of Women event, “Role & Responsibility of Men and Boys in Eliminating Gender-Based Violence”, in New York today:
The United Nations Palestinian Rights Committee will organize a virtual event on the margins of the sixty-sixth session of the Commission on the Status of Women on “Impact of forced displacement on Palestinian women” on 23 March from 10 a.m. to noon, via WebEx.
The Commission on the Status of Women continued its work today, hearing presentations from 12 Member States about their national efforts to implement the agreed outcome on its 2017 session’s theme “Women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work”.
Strong female-based societies, indigenous women, women legislators and girls are agents of positive change and role models for sustainability, protecting the Earth and forging monumental achievements along the common global path towards sustainable development, delegates said today, calling for action to include their knowledge and experiences, as the Commission on the Status of Women continued the general discussion segment of its sixty-sixth session.
Delegates urged the Commission on the Status of Women, on the third day of its annual session, to account for the differentiated impact climate change has on vulnerable groups ill-equipped to address the phenomenon — particularly rural, coastal and indigenous women — and empower these individuals to lead national and international efforts in response.
Four peacekeepers were injured near Tessalit yesterday, following an attack on their convoy using an improvised explosive device, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) reports. They were evacuated to Bamako, the capital, for medical treatment.